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A mug in his hand, a song on his lips, street balladeer offers his story

If you live downtown, you probably know Billyven Dandin. He's the guy shaking the mug and singing the same song every night.

Billyven Dandin lives at Strachan House. When he has a bad day, he comes to the computer and looks up his favourite songs on the computer, and he sings along. Singing makes him feel better. (KATIE DAUBS / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

Most nights, Billyven Dandin walks around downtown with his mug, which has a chain inside, and shakes it as he sings. Singing makes him feel better, and is his offering to the world, he says. (KATIE DAUBS / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

If you live downtown, you’ve probably heard the musical stylings of Billyven Dandin.

He’s the guy on the sidewalk, shaking a hardware store chain inside a plastic mug, singing a hypnotic melody of his own composition, squatting really low like he’s doing the twist. For years his deep voice has occasionally floated into your open window, as he sings the same song, keeping the same beat with the same cup.

The song is one of the most consistent things in his life, a string of 45 words that bring comfort, pride and pocket change. The tune is in his head when he wakes up, the cup is never far away. In a life of misery, the cup and song bring solace.

“The world punishes me if I don’t shake this,” he says, holding the navy blue cup. “The world expects me to do it because I can do it.”

At Strachan House, the rent-geared-to-income transitional housing where he lives, he writes down the lyrics in loopy cursive — they tell a story about “facing the game” and “fighting for my life.”

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“What I mean by that, I’m fighting for my life, because every time I go to sing, either someone says, ‘Get out of here,’ or ‘Shut up’ or “Here’s a toonie, go away.’ It's like I’m fighting for my life, because I’m fighting for money,” he says.

In between singing along to Backstreet Boys and Bon Jovi songs, Dandin talks about a troubled relationship with his parents, his love of music, and his struggles with alcohol and drugs. In the courthouses of the city, Dandin’s life is documented by an upcoming court date for a couple of drug related charges, and a long list of provincial offences such as littering, lying down on TTC property and soliciting in an aggressive manner. He has $7,678 in unpaid fines.

On a recent Monday, he got two trespassing tickets at a gas station.

“I smile. You know why? In this game, there is no injustice. It’s how you perceive it. If I was screaming, I’d wind up in jail, I wouldn’t have time to talk to you,” he says.

He is 49 according to his Haitian birth certificate, but it only counts the years since he was adopted by an Australian man and a Haitian woman. (So he’s really 59, since he was adopted at 10, he says.) His hair is white. He says it’s been like that since he was 14, which might mean 24.

He has a daughter in the U.S. he hasn’t seen in years, and one sister who is still alive in Haiti. Another sister who lived in Quebec died of breast cancer, he says. Dandin said his brother-in-law wired him the money to attend her funeral, and he used the money to smoke crack.

“It’s sad,” he says.

He once went through 18 months of rehab and he has been clean for years at a time. These days, his vices don’t control him like they used to, but he still smokes and drinks, he says. He doesn’t consider himself an addict. He calls himself a loner.

“I suffer from a terrible disease called ‘perfectionist,’ that’s what leads you to drugs and alcohol,” he says. “My game now is to restrain myself. I’m a Christian, I read my Bible every day.”

He pays his rent out of his Ontario Works cheque, but doesn’t have a lot of money left over, so every night he grabs his plastic mug and says, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not get hurt,” before he walks out of Strachan House. He walks along King St. and the Esplanade and informally opens and closes for concerts at the Air Canada Centre.

He says he got started at the Sherbourne subway station. As a woman performed “Amazing Grace,” he sang along, and someone put some change in his coffee cup. He liked the sound, and soon bought a sturdy plastic cup from the Salvation Army as a rhythm section. After years of banging change and rocks, he uses a chain to make the noise so many downtowners recognize as a sign of his approach.

His arms are muscular, his knuckles are whitened by frostbite from winter nights on the streets, and the pinky on his left hand doesn’t bend. He rests the bottom of cup on that pinky and puts his index finger on top, almost like he’s hanging ten. Then he shakes it up and down, and forgets his troubles.

He is touched by acts of kindness that define his days, and disappointed by bits of meanness that diminish them. The other day, a paid duty officer brought him a double-double coffee. A man in front of a Mirvish theatre once put three hundred-dollar bills in his mug, saying, “You’re worth more than what you’re shaking.” Once, some girls in a condo sang along and dropped pennies on him from their balcony. That was a sad night.

When he is feeling bad, because he can’t make $5, or people have laughed at him, he washes his face and goes to the computer at Strachan House, near the front desk, where he is sitting now on a sunny Monday afternoon.

He presses play, and does all the parts of the country tune. He talks along to the intro, wears his deep voice thin on the chorus, and taps someone else’s ATM card on the desk to the rhythm.

“No Celine today?” a woman asks from the office.

He puts on “A New Day.” As Dion sings about miracles and angels and second chances from her perch in the clouds, Dandin stands amid a few errant cigarette butts, pounds on the wall where people have written notes, and raises his arms in triumph. A person, probably staff, places a roll of toilet paper in his outstretched hands. He keeps the rhythm.

“I love the world. I mean it. I’d cry before I hurt the world,” he says. “A lot of things happen in my life, but there is always a door that’s wide open for you in life. Even if it’s hot, take a glove, and hold it, and open it, like the movie Backdraft,” he says, referencing the 1991 thriller.

He’d like to be a famous performer like Bon Jovi, but it doesn’t matter if he is on the street or in a limo.

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